There are lots of bad ecommerce home pages, right?
But one of them has to be the worst, right?

Well, I found it.

Domino’s Pizza. Having a lazy weekend, I wanted to order a pizza. While with pizza ordering by phone is probably easier, I thought I’d try the online experience, given I am an ecommerce consultant and all…

When I got to the homepage, a great big flash animation came up. “Click here for transformation”. This flash animation was full screen transparent, so I could see the big “Order online” button I wanted. I had three choices – click on the close link which was obscured by being positioned over some other text, click on “Click here for transformation”. Transform? Into what? I’m interested in transforming from hungry to full, that’s all. You literally could do nothing else without first dealing with this piece of flashturbation. Once you click on it, all it does is show you some animation. There’s no campaign, no offer, no competition, not even an especially good animation. And once it’s finished, you still need to find the obscure close button.

Dominos, I will put $5,000 of my personal money on the line. Run an A/B split test on that homepage – one with the animation, one without. My bet says that removing that animation as the sole variable of the test will boost sales at least 5%.

Why is this the worst? Because it’s not some backyard outfit. It’s not some dodgy “my cousin knows web stuff and installed OSCommerce for me” setup. This is a multinational company who cleary invested some serious money into their site, which in general isn’t a terrible site. Why oh why do they actually go out of their way to actively prevent their users from spending money with them?

PS. I tried to send them feedback. They want my full name, address and phone number as compulsory fields just to give feedback.